Former Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude has told MPs that HM Treasury’s “silo” mentality on spending doomed the current government’s missions agenda to failure.
Tory grandee Lord Maude’s comments came at a session of parliament’s Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee this morning.
Maude, who was a Treasury minister in the early 1990s in the Major administration and minister for the Cabinet Office from 2010-15 in the coalition government, was highly critical of the way the centre of government is set up – and in particular of HM Treasury’s silo-focused “dogma”.
He told MPs that HM Treasury suffered from a “theology” that caused it to be “hostile to anything that is done in a cross-government way”.
Maude said he didn’t understand the approach and that it “serves the country very badly”.
PACAC chair Simon Hoare asked Maude whether he had made his views known to the “current iterations” of the Treasury. He replied that he had.
“I’ve been consulted by several ministers in the current government,” Maude said. “One who asked for advice on how do we make mission government work.
“And I said: ‘I’m afraid you won’t. It’s a very good idea and some other governments have made it work. Why won’t it? Because the Treasury won’t allow it; because the Treasury are so hostile to the idea of a cross-cutting budget that you end up mired in the treacle of inter-departmental working groups and mission boards and stuff, where people lose the will to live.’”
Labour’s five cross-cutting missions were a cornerstone of the party’s manifesto for the 2024 general election, offering a long-term vision for policymaking on fundamental issues facing the nation.
The missions were: securing the highest sustained growth in the G7; making Britain a clean-energy “superpower”; building an NHS “fit for the future”; making Britain's streets safe; and breaking down barriers to opportunity.
Although they have never formally been abandoned, refreshes have focused on six “milestones” and three policy “priorities”, strongly signaling a change of tack.
At today’s session, PACAC chair Hoare said that the lack of cross-cutting funding for missions at recent fiscal events suggested HM Treasury’s approach was “business as usual” – rather than pro-mission.
Maude said today it had only occurred to him relatively recently that part of the reason the 2010-15 Conservative and Liberal Democrat administration had been very successful in driving cost savings in government was its ability to “frustrate or circumnavigate” HM Treasury’s opposition to cross-cutting work.
He said that Danny Alexander, Lib Dem chief secretary to the Treasury at the time, had been instrumental to the approach.